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BERLIN (Reuters) - An international commission is considering whether to designate the waters around Antarctica special marine reserves, a step campaigners say would safeguard the habitat of whales, seals and penguins and more than double the world’s protected sea area.Any change in status requires a unanimous decision by the 25 members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). Two members, Russia and Ukraine, have raised legal concerns, a German delegate told a media briefing on Monday....

Egyptians get most of their news from TV, rather than the Internet or newspapers, so when the local government scrambled the satellite TV signal earlier this week for the region’s dominant independent news channel, Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based network found a way to subvert that censorship: it used a tactic of frequency-switching to continue to reach its viewers. That wasn’t not the only trick Al Jazeera had up its sleeve, either....

PARIS (Reuters) - Taiwan has reported an outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N8 bird flu virus on a goose farm, the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) said on Monday. The outbreak started on Jan. 8 at a farm in Da-Lin Township, Chiayi County and killed 3,683 out of 5,200 birds, the Taiwanese authorities said in a report to the Paris-based OIE. The strain is the same as in other cases found in Europe, North America and elsewhere in Asia in the past year....

Restaurant owner and television personality Paula Deen, who became famous for her homestyle Southern cooking and unabashed love of butter, was recently accused of using a racial slur. Deen admitted to the transgression and apologized for it, though some found her comments to be hollow and disingenuous. Following her admission, the Food Network terminated her contract, and a number of sponsors including Smithfield Foods, Home Depot, and Walmart broke ties with her....

It seems that science has lost, and politics won, in the battle against COVID-19 here in the United States. A recent Pew Research study reports that up to 25 percent of people surveyed see some truth to conspiracy theories saying that people deliberately planned the coronavirus outbreak that has now led to the demise of over 170,000 Americans. As a physician, I have been frustrated by the turn in which this pandemic has taken....

For those who believe, Santa Claus and his team of reindeer have taken to the skies every Christmas Eve for the past 1,600 years. But this is the first time his young devotees will be able to track his progress via cell phone, Twitter about this momentous event, and share photos of their home countries via the Web. All three of these new capabilities result from a partnership between Google and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which as been tracking Santa’s annual trip for the past 50 years....

The honeycomb lattice is one of nature’s favorite patterns. In the two-dimensional crystal of carbon atoms known as graph­ene, for instance, the honeycomb structure arises from bonds among the atoms. Kenjiro K. Gomes of Stanford University and his colleagues have learned to make a honeycomb material in a striking new way. They place carbon monoxide molecules at regular intervals on the surface of a copper crystal, creating an imitation graphene layer....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The books of the New Testament were written in the 1st century CE. As Christianity spread in the 2nd century CE, many copies were made, some by non-professionals. Early manuscripts are considered to be closer to the original than later manuscripts as they are likely to have gone through fewer copying cycles....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Sometime around 330 BCE, Pytheas, a little-known Greek merchant, embarked on an astonishing voyage. It was a voyage that would take him far beyond the known boundaries of the Mediterranean, into lands thought to exist only in myth and legend. When he returned, his voyage and the amazing things he had witnessed would be debated for centuries....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Siege tactics were a crucial part of medieval warfare, especially from the 11th century CE when castles became more widespread in Europe and sieges outnumbered pitched battles. Castles and fortified cities offered protection to both the local population and armed forces and presented an array of defensive features which, in turn, led to innovations in weapons, siege engine technology, and strategies....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The world’s oldest love poem is The Love Song for Shu-Sin (c. 2000 BCE) composed in ancient Mesopotamia for use in part of the sacred rites of fertility. Prior to its discovery in the 19th century, and its translation in the 20th, the biblical Song of Songs was thought to be the oldest love poem extant....

How did people ever find the chemical that makes pupils dilate? Donald Mutti, a professor at the Ohio State University College of Optometry, eyes an answer to this query: The discovery was probably accidental. Dilating drops block receptors in the muscle that constricts the iris, the colored “curtain” of the eye that controls the amount of light traveling toward the retina. This hindrance allows the muscle that dilates the iris to act unopposed, causing the pupil—which is just a hole in the center of the iris—to enlarge....

By Anjali NayarAs fisheries regulators meet next week to weigh the fate of Atlantic bluefin tuna, they are coming under mounting pressure to suspend the entire bluefin industry until allegations of mismanagement can be resolved.The Madrid-based International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the body responsible for managing tuna fishing, gathers in Paris on 17 November to assess the state of bluefin tuna fisheries and set future catch quotas....

By Sharon Bernstein SACRAMENTO Calif. (Reuters) - A system to provide early warnings of earthquakes such as the one which shook California’s wine country this week is planned and ready to go, but two years after the scientific work finished, the funding is still being lined up. California passed a law last year to start the system, but did not appropriate the money needed to build it. A system to cover California, Washington and Oregon would cost $38 million, according to the U....

“It’s like being in the Bermuda Triangle,” says Rodger Hart of the iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator Based Science in South Africa. I take the compass to see for myself. At first the needle points in a steady direction, which for all I know could be magnetic north. But then I take a step forward, and the needle swings to a completely different quadrant. Another step, and yet another direction. Next I put the compass down against the large rock outcropping we are standing on....

Finding a bug in your drink is no one’s idea of a pleasant surprise. But a renowned chef and a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hope that a fanciful cocktail accessory modeled after an aquatic insect will delight rather than repulse. The tiny, boat-shaped gadget propels itself around the surface of a beverage for up to two minutes using a trick borrowed from nature. The boat contains a potent liquor, which it steadily dispenses into the cocktail through a notch at one end....

This summer Chinese scientists begin analyzing the first new samples brought back from the moon in 45 years—specimens that could reset the clock on not just lunar chronology but also planetary bodies’ evolution across the solar system. And researchers around the world are eager to get a look. China’s Chang’e 5 mission, whose return capsule reached Earth last December, collected about 1.7 kilograms of rock and soil from Oceanus Procellarum (the Ocean of Storms) in the northwestern corner of the moon’s near side....

Is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody. —Angela Carter, English novelist (1940–1992) We are our nervous system. Our brain “drives” our body in an evolutionary quest for food and mates. If you could remove parts of your nervous system one by one, what minimal set would need to remain for you to still be you? Quadriplegic patients don’t lose consciousness or emotions, despite spinal cord damage interrupting the brain signals to their limbs and torso....

By Victoria Cavaliere (Reuters) - The Obama administration is teaming up with researchers from Texas to intensify the battle against a fungus that has caused $1 billion in damage to coffee plants across Latin America and the Caribbean, U.S. foreign aid officials said on Sunday. The so-called leaf rust, or roya, is a yellow and orange-colored fungus that has swept coffee fields from Mexico to Peru over the past two years, threatening to stunt production and drive up the price of Latin American roasts....

In the brand-new fossil vault at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa, shelf space is already running out. The glass-doored cabinets lining the room brim with bones of early human relatives found over the past 92 years in the many caves of the famed Cradle of Humankind region, just 40 kilometers northwest of here. The country’s store of extinct humans has long ranked among the most extensive collections in the world....